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They only cooked kosher food in our family. Hens were taken only to the hakham to be slaughtered. Pork never entered our house, God forbid. During the week, we ate the bread we bought at the bakery, for there were so many bakeries in Dorohoi – owned by Jews –, you couldn’t decide where to buy from. But it was mandatory to bake bread for Saturday, on Saturday you weren’t allowed to buy bread from the store, from the bakery. On Friday, even the poorest Jew baked “coilici” for Saturday. [Ed. note: Coilici is a variant for challah, similar to the word „kajlics“ used by some Hungarian speaking Jews in Romania. Both words have the origin of the Hungarian word „kalacs“.] My grandmother had a little oven, but my aunt had a stove instead – the kitchen range protruded and inside the wall there was the iron plate oven, and that’s where she baked the bread for Saturday, inside that iron plate oven. They baked coilici, regular bread, inside an elongated tray, either kneaded or as 3 or 4 rolls – my aunt, being younger, used to knead them. You didn’t place the whole coilici on the table, you sliced it. When you sat down to eat, the bread was already sliced and placed on the table in a special plate, and everyone took a slice from there to eat.
They served a vorspeis on Friday evening – fish, traditionally, if you had it, if not, chicken breast meatballs, beiligfish. The fish was served boiled, not fried, and portioned, divided into portions for each individual person. If it were a smaller variety of crucian carp, every person ate a small fish, but if it were a large fish – a carp – it was sliced, and everyone received a piece on his plate, with a little amount of gravy – the fish gravy was dense, it had a gelatin-like consistency, for it was served cold. And if you didn’t have fish, if you couldn’t buy it at the market, you made beiligfish, meatballs served as vorspeis. Then they served soup – only chicken soup, never beef soup. They boiled homemade noodles for the soup, you made them using a rolling pin and then sliced them. After the soup, we had chicken meat. We ate beef during the week, but there was this tradition of eating only poultry on the Sabbath. That’s my experience of it. And then stewed fruit at the end of the meal. In the old days, in my day, people used to eat stewed fruit made from carrots and chickpea. Plums also – more recently. Chickpea is a bean similar to pea seed, and you mixed that with a bit of rice and sweetened it, and that was the 4th course. And you had this ritual every Saturday afternoon. They didn’t make chulent. Chulent was prepared by the more fanatical families, relatives of rabbis, of hakhamim, but most people didn’t.
They served a vorspeis on Friday evening – fish, traditionally, if you had it, if not, chicken breast meatballs, beiligfish. The fish was served boiled, not fried, and portioned, divided into portions for each individual person. If it were a smaller variety of crucian carp, every person ate a small fish, but if it were a large fish – a carp – it was sliced, and everyone received a piece on his plate, with a little amount of gravy – the fish gravy was dense, it had a gelatin-like consistency, for it was served cold. And if you didn’t have fish, if you couldn’t buy it at the market, you made beiligfish, meatballs served as vorspeis. Then they served soup – only chicken soup, never beef soup. They boiled homemade noodles for the soup, you made them using a rolling pin and then sliced them. After the soup, we had chicken meat. We ate beef during the week, but there was this tradition of eating only poultry on the Sabbath. That’s my experience of it. And then stewed fruit at the end of the meal. In the old days, in my day, people used to eat stewed fruit made from carrots and chickpea. Plums also – more recently. Chickpea is a bean similar to pea seed, and you mixed that with a bit of rice and sweetened it, and that was the 4th course. And you had this ritual every Saturday afternoon. They didn’t make chulent. Chulent was prepared by the more fanatical families, relatives of rabbis, of hakhamim, but most people didn’t.
Period
Location
Dorohoi
Romania
Interview
Simon Meer
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